Patterns of Culture: An Enduring Classic

By Ruth Benedict

An anthropologist compares three diverse societies in this groundbreaking, “unique and important” cultural study (The New York Times).
 
A remarkable introduction to cultural studies, Patterns of Culture made history in exploring the role of culture in shaping our lives. In it, the renowned anthropologist Ruth Benedict offers an in-depth look at three societies—the Zuñi of the southwestern United States, the Kwakiutl of western Canada, and the Dobuans of Melanesia—and demonstrates the diversity of behaviors in them.
 
Benedict’s groundbreaking study shows that a unique configuration of traits defines each human culture and she examines the relationship between culture and the individual. Featuring prefatory remarks by Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, and Louise Lamphere, who calls it “a foundational text in teaching us the value of diversity,” this provocative work ultimately explores what it means to be human.
 
“That today the modern world is on such easy terms with the concept of culture . . . is in very great part due to this book.” —Margaret Mead

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9780547523927

Ruth Benedict

RUTH BENEDICT (1887–1948) was a prominent American anthropologist, a protégée of Franz Boas, and a contemporary (and close friend) of Margaret Mead. Benedict’s other major books include Patterns of Culture and The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. She was also an accomplished poet, often writing under the pseudonym Anne Singleton.

Book preview

First Mariner Books edition 2005

Copyright © 1934 by Ruth Benedict

Copyright © renewed 1961 by Ruth Valentine

Preface copyright © 1959 by Margaret Mead

Foreword copyright © 2005 by Louise Lamphere

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Benedict, Ruth, 1887–1948

Patterns of culture / by Ruth Benedict; with a foreword by Louise Lamphere and a preface by Margaret Mead.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-618-61955-9 (pbk.)

ISBN-10: 0-618-61955-0 (pbk.)

1. Culture. 2. Psychological anthropology. 3. Zuñi Indians. 4. Kwakiutl Indians. 5. Ethnology—Papua New Guinea—Dobu Island. 6. Dobu Island (Papua New Guinea)—Social Life and Customs.

I. Title.

GN506.B46 1989 89-7428

306—dc20 CIP

eISBN 978-0-547-52392-7

v6.0119

In the beginning God gave to every people a cup of clay, and from this cup they drank their life.

Proverb of Digger Indians

Foreword to the Mariner Books Edition

Patterns of Culture was the first anthropology book I read, and it inspired me to become a cultural anthropologist and college teacher. More than forty-five years ago, when I was a young white college sophomore spending the summer in the Colorado Rockies not far from my home in Denver, Benedict’s poetic evocation of non-Western cultures invited me into a discipline that valued cultural difference and called for a vision of humanity that celebrated the broad spectrum of human behavior and the varied repertoire of cultures across the world. I had recently been steeped in a course on Western civilization at Stanford University, and this book presented several completely different ways of looking at the world. Even though the Zuñi lived in New Mexico, only about four hundred miles from my hometown, at the time I knew little about their complex ceremonial life and philosophy. I was even more unfamiliar with the Kwakiutl and the Dobu, the two other peoples Benedict describes in the book. The literary quality of her descriptions and the poetic images she called forth gave each culture a complexity and a positive value that opened up other ways of thinking that were very different from my own experience.

Ruth Benedict was the age of my grandmother, but her book still has something to say to my child’s generation and that of his children. In the globalized world of the twenty-first century, we Americans are much more likely to encounter difference on the street, in the subway, at a restaurant, in the classroom, or at the workplace. The telephone and the Internet put us in touch with individuals, organizations, and cultures across the globe. In my classes at the University of New Mexico, Navajo and Zuñi students are mixed with Anglo-Americans and Hispanos, but also children of immigrants from Iran, Nepal, Vietnam, or Colombia. Though students are often shy about revealing their personal situations, class discussions help students appreciate the persistence of Zuñi culture, the role of arranged marriage in the life of a young woman from Nepal, or the strategies a single Anglo mother uses to combine child rearing with full-time employment. As we increasingly encounter peoples of different cultures, it is ever more important to have a basis for understanding them. Patterns of Culture offers such a framework.

One of the most enduring metaphors used by Benedict in Patterns of Culture is that of a great arc across which range the possible interests provided by the environment, the age cycle, and human activities. Each culture selects from that arc of possibilities, choosing to emphasize one or several, giving that culture its particular pattern. As Benedict says, Its identity as a culture depends upon the selection of some segments of this arc. . . . Each from the point of view of another ignores fundamentals and exploits irrelevancies. Benedict’s contribution was not only to present us with the portions of the arc selected by three cultures—the Zuñi, the Dobu, and the Kwakiutl—but to help us, her readers, to value all portions of the arc itself, and to see how each selection could be understood on its own terms. The point was to value, not to judge. She rejected the view that Western society was the best, the most evolved, and asserted that each culture must be seen as it sees itself. These are the tenets of cultural relativism, a much-needed approach even in a world where we have adopted a nonrelativistic code of universal human rights and seek to protect the rights of women and children everywhere.

Today, it is important to read Patterns of Culture through a double lens, first as a historical document written during the 1930s, before World War II, the atomic bomb, the United Nations, air travel, and television. As such, the book shaped anthropology, popularized the term culture, and led Western readers to an appreciation of other ways of life. Second, Patterns of Culture is a text that still has relevance to the contemporary American scene. It foreshadows recent approaches to cultural description in anthropology that borrow heavily from literary traditions, and it calls attention to cultural diversity as much as issues of cultural integration. Deeply embedded in Benedict’s analysis of other cultures is a critique of American society—for example, its inability to view other cultures as unique, its reluctance to accept homosexuality, its rejection of trance or shamanistic practice as legitimate forms of healing, or its blindness to extreme behaviors in its own history.

Benedict is usually viewed as a founder of the Culture and Personality approach to anthropology that flourished in the 1930s and 1940s. After World War II, when this tendency was replaced, her work was often criticized for overemphasizing cultural wholes and cultural integration rather than focusing on sources of variability, conflict, and tension. In recent years, though, scholars have seen other tendencies in Benedict’s work, many that seem to be forerunners of current ways of interpreting cultural materials. Benedict anticipated the ways in which some anthropologists now stress the symbolic, metaphorical, and semiotic aspects of culture, much as literary critics analyze novels, plays, or poetry. Embedded in the more global descriptions of the Zuñi and the Kwakiutl is Benedict’s careful attention to detail and to the routines of daily life. Her work thus resonates with contemporary emphasis on individual agency and what anthropologists call practice: the ordinary daily actions and the extraordinary ceremonial performances that both produce and express the larger cultural patterns that Benedict evoked in each of her case studies.

Benedict felt herself to be an outsider within her own culture. She was especially attuned to the role of the deviant, the individual who does not fit into the dominant cultural pattern. She argued for a relativist notion of deviance. Using the example of homosexuality, she suggested that, although in Western cultures homosexuality was regarded as a perversion, in other cultures—for example, in ancient Greece and among the Pueblo of the Southwest—it had a valued place. As part of the recent reappraisal, feminist and lesbian and gay anthropologists have claimed Ruth Benedict as a foremother.

Benedict’s feminism stemmed from her early struggles to find a profession and then to earn a central place within it. Her position as a woman blocked some avenues in anthropology, despite the popularity of her books and her respected position as a theorist. She was denied the position of chair of the Columbia Anthropology Department and was promoted to full professor only six months before her death in 1948. She was, however, a tenured member of a major department, taught students in the next generation of anthropologists, and was elected president of the American Anthropological Association in 1947. Among all the women of her generation, she was the most central to the discipline.

New readings of Patterns of Culture are integrating Benedict’s insights into a very different anthropology from that of her era. Field research and ethnography have changed dramatically since Boas visited the Kwakiutl on Vancouver Island in 1886 and Ruth Benedict spent the summer of 1924 in Zuñi. Now anthropologists are much more engaged in collaborative efforts with the communities they study and are concerned about the varieties of critical social issues that indigenous peoples face in the areas of land rights, cultural preservation, health, and environment. Ethnographic descriptions of contemporary lives present more individual voices and native exegesis of cultural values and performances, going a step beyond Benedict’s use of chants and song texts as a way of presenting the native point of view. Native populations have much more control over research and the presentation of their culture to the outside world. The Zuñi have their own Cultural Resources Enterprise, which includes an archaeology program and a museum, and the Pueblo of Acoma (seventy miles away) have opened a new Sky City Visitors’ Center with a museum and historical archive. The Kwakiutl (now the Kwakwaka’wakwa) have been undergoing a cultural revival over the past twenty years, encouraging carvers and artists in the use of traditional designs for totem poles, jewelry, and other crafts. Their U’mista Cultural Centre contains a permanent exhibit of repatriated artifacts and exports the work of Kwakwaka’wakwa artists to the Netherlands and other European countries. They also train other indigenous groups in tourism and ecotourism. The National Museum of the American Indian, directed by a Native American and staffed by Native American curators, stands on the Mall in Washington, D.C., and presents to the visiting public Native American views of their cultures and histories. These examples of cultural preservation, environmental management, and continued outreach to other populations through tourism, museums, and cultural programming nurture diversity in a global context.

Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture is a foundational text in teaching us the value of diversity. Her hope for the future still has resonance in the twenty-first century: that recognition of cultural relativity will create an appreciation for the coexisting and equally valid patterns of life which mankind has created for itself from the raw materials of existence.

LOUISE LAMPHERE

Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2005

Preface

by Margaret Mead

For a quarter of a century, Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture has provided a felicitous and provocative introduction to the understanding of anthropology. Translated into fourteen languages, with more than 800,000 copies printed in the Mentor edition alone at this writing, Patterns of Culture has helped to knit the sciences and the humanities together during a period when they had drawn very far apart.

When Ruth Benedict began her work in anthropology in 1921, the term culture, as we use it today for the systematic body of learned behavior which is transmitted from parents to children, was part of the vocabulary of a small and technical group of professional anthropologists. That today the modern world is on such easy terms with the concept of culture, that the words in our culture slip from the lips of educated men and women almost as effortlessly as do the phrases that refer to period and to place, is in very great part due to this book.

For the book was and is important in several ways. First, it is the best introduction we have to the widening of horizons by a comparative study of different cultures, through which we can see our own socially transmitted customary behavior set beside that of other and strangely different peoples. In her use of this comparative method Ruth Benedict spoke for the whole developing science of anthropology in the United States, England and France. Her distinction is that she spoke with such clarity and style.

On this basis she developed her own special contribution, her view of human cultures as personality writ large, her view that it was possible to see each culture, no matter how small and primitive or how large and complex, as having selected from the great arc of human potentialities certain characteristics and then having elaborated them with greater strength and intensity than any single individual could ever do in one lifetime. She named the emphases in the cultures she described Apollonian, Dionysian and Paranoid, drawing on descriptions of individual personality to give point to her argument. But she was building no typology; she held no belief that Nietzschean or psychiatric labels were suitable for all societies. Nor did she believe that any closed system could be constructed into which all human societies, past, present and future, would fit. Rather, she was committed to a picture of developing human cultures for which no limit could be set because the possible combinations were so many and so varied as to be inexhaustible. But, as her knowledge of different cultures grew, so her initial sense that the individual was the creature of culture and so was in no way responsible for the discomfort of his position if he was born or accidentally bred to deviance, changed to a detailed consideration of where and in what ways men could shape their culture closer to their highest vision. The belief that this was possible was to grow.

Originally a student of literature, she hoped to find a really important undiscovered country, but at first she thought of this adventure as learning Russian or French well enough to be really at home in the verse. Later she came to feel that each primitive culture represented something comparable to a great work of art or literature, and that this is how the comparison between modern individual works of art and primitive culture should be made, rather than by comparing the scratched designs on the edge of a pot with the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or berrypicking songs with Shakespeare. When only single arts were compared, primitive cultures had little to offer; but if one took these cultures whole—the religion, the mythology, the everyday ways of men and women—then the internal consistency and the intricacy was as aesthetically satisfying to the would-be explorer as was any single work of art.

On another level, Patterns of Culture is concerned with a problem that was central to Ruth Benedict’s own life—the relationship between each human being, with a specific hereditary endowment and particular life history, and the culture in which he or she lived. In her own search for identity, she had persistently wondered whether she would have fitted better into another period or another culture than she fitted into contemporary America. She was particularly concerned with the extent to which one culture could find a place for extremes of behavior—in the mystic, the seer, the artist—which another culture branded as abnormal or worthless. Here again, she was not concerned with the question of normal and abnormal behavior as these problems concern the student of mental health. Because she asked the question about the relationship between cultures and abnormality, she opened the way for inquiries by students who were interested in the way in which mental disease differed from one culture to another. But she herself was rather concerned with the question of how narrow definitions of normal behavior penalize or give preference to certain innate capacities, and of how the widening of cultural definitions might enrich our culture and lighten the load of rejection under which the cultural deviant now labors. In her relationships with her colleagues and her students it was the unusual talent or personal destiny, the rare combination, the precious uniqueness which aroused her active solicitude and her quick compassion.

Finally, I believe Patterns of Culture has lived because of her robust conviction that a knowledge of how culture works gives to human beings a greater control over their own future than they have ever known before. It comes as a surprise to the reader, first caught in a recognition of the strength of the cultural web, to have this very strength in the end turned back into the context of a mankind grown wise through knowledge of the very cultural web in which he first appeared to be caught. This belief was to grow stronger through the years as Ruth Benedict assumed greater and greater responsibility for attitudes toward race, toward education, toward winning the war and winning the peace.

In 1939, when Nazi racism threatened freedom everywhere, she devoted her one free semester to writing Race: Science and Politics. During the war she brought her talents for cultural analysis through working with living informants to a study of cultures made inaccessible by wartime conditions—Romania, Germany, the Netherlands, Thailand and, finally, Japan. At the end of the war she wrote The Chrysanthemum and the Sword in the hope that an understanding of Japanese ability to try new paths would make Americans wiser in their postwar relationships with Japan. Here was a sturdy belief, nourished on years of combining research and policy decisions. But in Patterns of Culture the hope of how anthropology might be used by men for their chosen ends was fresh and young, and this freshness lies like dew upon her words, to entrance each reader who meets this view of the world for the first time.

New York, October 1958

Acknowledgments

THE three primitive peoples described in this volume have been chosen because knowledge of these tribes is comparatively full and satisfactory and because I was able to supplement published descriptions with many discussions with the field ethnologists who have lived intimately with these peoples and who have written the authoritative descriptions of the tribes in question. I have myself lived several summers in the pueblo of Zuñi, and among some of the neighbouring tribes which I have used to contrast with pueblo culture. I owe a great debt to Dr. Ruth L. Bunzel, who learned the Zuñi language and whose accounts of Zuñi and collections of texts are the best of all the available pueblo studies. For the description of Dobu I am indebted to Dr. Reo F. Fortune’s invaluable monograph, The Sorcerers of Dobu, and to many delightful conversations. For the Northwest Coast of America I have used not only Professor Franz Boas’s text publications and detailed compilations of Kwakiutl life, but his still unpublished material and his penetrating comment upon his experience on the Northwest Coast extending over forty years.

For the presentations here I am alone responsible and it may be that I have carried some interpretations further than one or another of the field-workers would have done. But the chapters have been read and verified as to facts by these authorities upon these tribes, and references to their detailed studies are given for those who wish to consult the full accounts.

I wish to make grateful acknowledgment to the original publishers for permission to reprint certain paragraphs from the following articles: ‘The Science of Custom,’ in The Century Magazine; ‘Configurations of Culture in North America,’ in The American Anthropologist; and ‘Anthropology and the Abnormal,’ in The Journal of General Psychology.

Thanks are due also to E. P. Dutton and Company, publishers of Sorcerers of Dobu.

RUTH BENEDICT

Introduction

DURING the present century many new approaches to the problems of social anthropology have developed. The old method of constructing a history of human culture based on bits of evidence, torn out of their natural contacts, and collected from all times and all parts of the world, has lost much of its hold. It was followed by a period of painstaking attempts at reconstruction of historical connections based on studies of distribution of special features and supplemented by archaeological evidence. Wider and wider areas were looked upon from this viewpoint. Attempts were made to establish firm connections between various cultural features and these were used to establish wider historical connections. The possibility of independent development of analogous cultural features which is a postulate of a general history of culture has been denied or at least consigned to an inconsequential role. Both the evolutionary method and the analysis of independent local cultures were devoted to unravelling the sequences of cultural forms. While by means of the former it was hoped to build up a unified picture of the history of culture and civilization, the adherents of the latter methods, at least among its more conservative adherents, saw each culture as a single unit and as an individual historical problem.

Under the influence of the intensive analysis of cultures the indispensable collection of facts relating to cultural forms has received a strong stimulus. The material so collected gave us information on social life, as though it consisted of strictly separated categories, such as economic life, technology, art, social organization, religion, and the unifying bond was difficult to find. The position of the anthropologist seemed like that satirized by Gœthe:

Wer will was Lebendig’s erkennen und beschreiben,

Sucht erst den Geist heraus zu treiben,

Dann hat er die Teile in seiner Hand,

Fehlt leider nur das geistige Band.

The occupation with living cultures has created a stronger interest in the totality of each culture. It is felt more and more that hardly any trait of culture can be understood when taken out of its general setting. The attempt to conceive a whole culture as controlled by a single set of conditions did not solve the problem. The purely anthropo-geographical, economic, or in other ways formalistic approach seemed to give distorted pictures.

The desire to grasp the meaning of a culture as a whole compels us co consider descriptions of standardized behaviour merely as a stepping-stone leading to other problems. We must understand the individual as living in his culture; and the culture as lived by individuals. The interest in these socio-psychological problems is not in any way opposed to the historical approach. On the contrary, it reveals dynamic processes that have been active in cultural changes and enables us to evaluate evidence obtained from the detailed comparison of related cultures.

On account of the character of the material the problem of cultural life presents itself often as that of the interrelation between various aspects of culture. In some cases this study leads to a better appreciation of the intensity or lack of integration of a culture. It brings out clearly the forms of integration in various types of culture which prove that the relations between different aspects of culture follow the most diverse patterns and do not lend themselves profitably to generalizations. However, it leads rarely, and only indirectly, to an understanding of the relation between individual and culture.

This requires a deep penetration into the genius of the culture, a knowledge of the attitudes controlling individual and group behaviour. Dr. Benedict calls the genius of culture its configuration. In the present volume the author has set before us this problem and has illustrated it by the example of three cultures that are permeated each by one dominating idea. This treatment is distinct from the so-called functional approach to social phenomena in so far as it is concerned rather with the discovery of fundamental attitudes than with the functional relations of every cultural item. It is not historical except in so far as the general configuration, as long as it lasts, limits the directions of change that remain subject to it. In comparison to changes of content of culture the configuration has often remarkable permanency.

As the author points out, not every culture is characterized by a dominant character, but it seems probable that the more intimate our knowledge of the cultural drives that actuate the behaviour of the individual, the more we shall find that certain controls of emotion, certain ideals of conduct, prevail that account for what seem to us as abnormal attitudes when viewed from the standpoint of our civilization. The relativity of what is considered social or asocial, normal or abnormal, is seen in a new light.

The extreme cases selected by the author make clear the importance of the problem.

FRANZ BOAS

I

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The Science of Custom

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ANTHROPOLOGY is the study of human beings as creatures of society. It fastens its attention upon those physical characteristics and industrial techniques, those conventions and values, which distinguish one community from all others that belong to a different tradition.

The distinguishing mark of anthropology among the social sciences is that it includes for serious study other societies than our own. For its purposes any social regulation of mating and reproduction is as significant as our own, though it may be that of the Sea Dyaks, and have no possible historical relation to that of our civilization. To the anthropologist, our customs and those of a New Guinea tribe are two possible social schemes for dealing with a common problem, and in so far as he remains an anthropologist he is bound to avoid any weighting of one in favour of the other. He is interested in human behaviour, not as it is shaped by one tradition, our own, but as it has been shaped by any tradition whatsoever. He is interested in the great gamut of custom that is found in various cultures, and his object is to understand the way in which these cultures change and differentiate, the different forms through which they express themselves, and the manner in which the customs of any peoples function in the lives of the individuals who compose them.

Now custom has not been commonly regarded as a subject of any great moment. The inner workings of our own brains we feel to be uniquely worthy of investigation, but custom, we have a way of thinking, is behaviour at its most commonplace. As a matter of fact, it is the other way around. Traditional custom, taken the world over, is a mass of detailed behavior more astonishing than what any one person can ever evolve in individual actions no matter how aberrant. Yet that is a rather trivial aspect of the matter. The fact of first-rate importance is the predominant role that custom plays in experience and in belief, and the very great varieties it may manifest.

No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. Even in his philosophical probings he cannot go behind these stereotypes; his very concepts of the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional customs. John Dewey has said in all seriousness that the part played by custom in shaping the behaviour of the individual as over against any way in which he can affect traditional custom, is as the proportion of the total vocabulary of his mother tongue over against those words of his own baby talk that are taken up into the vernacular of his family. When one seriously studies social orders that have had the opportunity to develop autonomously, the figure becomes no more than an exact and matter-of-fact observation. The life-history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behaviour. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities. Every child that is born into his group will share them with him, and no child born into one on the opposite side of the globe can ever achieve the thousandth part. There is no social problem it is more incumbent upon us to understand than this of the rôle of custom. Until we are intelligent as to its laws and varieties the main complicating facts of human life must remain unintelligible.

The study of custom can be profitable only after certain preliminary propositions have been accepted, and some of these propositions have been violently opposed. In the